Cooperation Beats Competition

For several years now I have been concerned that my teenage son would not easily develop into a fully functioning adult man. From the age of about 14 he changed. I knew him to be intelligent and articulate kid. Suddenly he appeared to become incapable of what I considered to be normal human communication. A series of grunts, monosyllables and shrugs of the shoulder seemed to be all he could muster. He could use this method to meet his basic needs of food, shelter and, of course, his game console and computer.

For the most part, this has been his mode of communication for a few years now. If you really want to hear him talk, ask him to tell you about his latest game. Not for us the easy and more familiar world of football scores or basketball plays. Our bonding moments these days occur over the tally of the number of kills he made, or the number of "golds" he earned, or what level his latest character is on. I have had to learn a new language in order to have a basic understanding of what occupies him for much of his time. To my anguish, he seemed destined for "super geek-dom". I could foresee him living a solitary life in front of a computer, tapping away at a virtual world, and disconnected from humankind. He'd be conducting raids on foreign lands, killing, being killed, and then reviving himself at a keystroke to begin the game again.

Here's just a small peek into the new language I have learned: PVP (player versus player), RPG (role playing games), raiding parties, FPS (first person shooter), MMOG (massively multiplayer online game), RTS (real time strategy), TBS (turn based strategy), NPC (non player character), and perhaps appropriately for me (in spite of my age), "noob" (a newbie to the game world).

His mother, too, was concerned about his grades, his future, his socialization skills, and just how much he likes conquering others and killing his opponents. I reminded her that she sounded just like our grandparents did in the good old days. As kids we didn't mind our manners, we talked too much or not enough. Left to our own devices we would run around outside pretending to be cops and robbers, killing each other, or being killed, and then being magically revived and "shooting" each other once again. Our weapons were fingers and sticks pointed at our targets, along with shouts of "POW!", and theatrical award-winning dying sequences.

A far cry from the virtual reality point and click world? Perhaps. It seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Without stereotyping or generalizing, "Boys will be boys," you may say. "It's our natural tendency to kill or be killed." "Survival of the fittest." "Dog eat dog." Game designers have tapped into this [psyche]. Take a look at some of the titles on my son's game library; "Warhammer", "Spore", "Star Wars" (hey, I recognize that one!), "World of Warcraft", "Dead Rising", "Gears of War", and "Grand Theft Auto", just to name a few. It's the way things are, whether in corporate America, on the inner city streets, in countries torn by civil wars... In so many ways, the games are in fact a reflection of the "real" world.

In these games that imitate life, the principle of competition and domination seems to be the rule. In order to win, whatever our circumstance may be, we set out to acquire and dominate all of the resources that will help us achieve our goals. Often times we ignore the impact these actions have on other people, and in fact we even convince ourselves sometimes that the other people don't matter. They are competing for the same resource and should simply be eliminated. Even if you succeed with this approach, you create two long term problems for yourself. The first is that you make enemies out of everyone you encounter, including people on your own team. Their loyalty is very weak and secured only by fear. The second is that even if you succeed at dominating a resource for a while, eventually all those competitors will find another way and your environment will change rapidly and not in a pleasant way. That will be a time when you need allies to help you evolve and take on the next big opportunity. The problem is, nobody will be there to help.

Players get really good at raiding each other's worlds. They have trigger fingers that can hit that key so quickly you can't even see the movement. And when they play on-line with others, they get really smart about tactics. They learn to take orders from [bosses], to collaborate with others to successfully complete their attacks, and to wait their turn for rewards. The first time I heard that one, I wondered what happened to the old "That's just not fair" complaint, when measuring out how much soda he had compared with his older sister.

Occasionally my son comes out with an Australian expression that he learned from someone called Bruce. He might say something in Japanese that he heard last night, or he'll say something about his friend in Holland. I've learned not to be surprised at anything he comes out with. It's when he speaks in a perfect Scottish accent that I check under the bed to see if there's anything there that might explain this amazing transformation. The answer is that he's chatting to real people, real Aussies, Japanese or Dutch or Scotsmen. There's no age difference, self-consciousness, race, gender, shyness or embarrassment in his virtual world. Everyone's on the same page, everyone has something in common. And - guess what - they are all talking to and cooperating with each other!

Being a concerned parent, I decided to do some research to see if I could understand his "condition". My mind was put somewhat at ease to find out that he was in the company of millions of others. The book by John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade titled "The Kids are Alright: How the Gamer Generation is Changing the Workplace" was a great help. If you have a teenage gamer or may be hiring young gamers, that book is a very helpful place to start.

Until now, success in his gaming world has been measured in body counts, size of territory and money in the bank. Not too dissimilar from the real world? In business, we'd all love to see the marketplace littered with the remains of our competitors. We'd love to be "king" of our territory. And of course one of our major reasons for doing this is to put money in the bank. And how do we do this? We do it by strategizing, by raiding, then attacking and eliminating our opponents, and ultimately reaping the rewards.

Even though my son learned a lot about collaborating and working with others to successfully play these games, the goal was always the same - domination. In business we assemble large groups of people and partners to collaborate and cooperate with the same ultimate goal in mind. Some of those partners will attach themselves to a large company to ride the coat tails of its success and catch the bread crumbs as it plunders its way through the market. All of the people involved are motivated by the opportunity to make a "quick killing". Dominate quickly, get rich, and get out. For every one that is successful, thousands of others are driven out of business. In this resource domination model, those without the means to acquire large numbers of resources quickly simply cannot keep up. You might say "but this is the natural order of things in the competitive marketplace". You would be totally right. What we need to do is change the paradigm that we live in a competitive marketplace to one where cooperation is the rule. Cooperation enables us to take on much larger projects than we could ever dream of doing by ourselves by leveraging the strengths and resources of others.

Over dinner recently, my son was quieter than usual. I knew that he'd bought a new video game, which he'd been playing for a few days. He said that the game had gone from super-easy and fun to ridiculously difficult. It had seemed so simple: "You get stuff and then do stuff then you colonize space." He explained that you start off with choosing the environment you would like to grow in. You have a choice of forests, deserts, jungles, seashore, and so on. Then you decide whether you are a carnivore, herbivore, or omnivore. You get to choose personality traits like aggressive or collaborative.

Your character is now ready to be born. You have great flexibility in this area as well, being able to assemble creatures with the most unlikely features and limb structure. Of course, you need to make selections based on the environment you have chosen so that you can feed and move about successfully. Now you devour as much food as you can in your new domain and soon you stretch yourself beyond that to the world at large.

All the while your character is growing in strength almost regardless of the characteristics you had chosen at the start. You are successfully becoming the leader of your world. You now go to the next level outer space. Suddenly you are faced with traveling to far away galaxies and meeting new strange creatures and conditions. All the tactics you learned from growing up in your home world no longer seem to work. His character was a very aggressive carnivore. He believed he needed to be the most powerful and awesome warrior he could be. He knew he would face many challenges. He was able to destroy and dominate anything that got in his way. By being the ultimate competitor, he became the conqueror of his world.

Once he got to outer space, however, he found many situations that he was not well equipped to manage. Food sources were sapped away. As an aggressive character, he had an unusually large number of enemies and very few, if any, allies. It became clear to him very quickly that he had made a mistake. As a lone wolf aggressor, he was not going to survive. He needed the talents and skills of other characters, and he needed to be more versatile himself.

He found, by experience, that there is no way to win in this game, or any significant game, without learning how to cooperate with others. That means developing skills that are helpful to others, and matching other's skills to your unique needs at any given time. Without the right collaborative, team building, cooperative spirit, you will simply fade away. In business, three key elements must be aligned to create the potential for success. They are: 1. A compelling vision; 2. Comprehensive strategies to execute that vision; and 3. Committed leadership to achieve the vision and strategies. My son's experience shows us that leading with this spirit of cooperation will unleash the potential and catapult the business forward to the next level.

What a great lesson for a teenager. He learned that to execute your vision and strategies you will need resources from other, including suppliers, operating systems, capital, and distribution. In a competitive model, your tendency is to protect your great ideas and your resources, and to exploit those provided by others. This wall of protection makes collaboration and the acquisition of resources very difficult, time-consuming, and expensive as everyone plays the same game. By adjusting your leadership attitude to one of cooperation, you effectively dissolve the wall and invite other people in. Suddenly you find people who are excited about your vision and want to help you make it happen. Others with specific resources or expertise can and will directly support the execution of your strategy. Acquiring motivated partners is easy and may cost you nothing as they all attach themselves to the bigger dream of your vision. Having many independent champions for your vision will expand your leadership beyond any limits you could imagine. Cooperation makes the pie larger for everyone and it creates sustainable businesses built on the strength of a far more potent resource. What is that resource? In a word: "relationships". Cooperative relationships enable everyone to succeed, and they will be with you and you with them when the next waves of change come along.

Patrick Smyth. Business Leadership Navigator. Serving high growth businesses in developing compelling business strategies and lead change to improve performance. Helping leaders overcome challenges to achieve their goals and reconnect them with their dreams. 615-261-8585 http://www.innovationhabitude.com

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